


For Services Rendered.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: GoldenEye (1995), James Bond - All Media Types
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-04-28
Updated: 2005-04-28
Packaged: 2017-10-08 08:52:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/74835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look into the mind of Alec Trevelyan.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Services Rendered.

When Alec was young, he read all the time and he read everything he could get his hands on. It didn't matter if it was poetry or Greek romances or a text on drainage systems. He liked to read. There wasn't anything else to do.

Somewhere along the line, he stumbled across the truism that money couldn't buy happiness. That, Alec knew, had to have come from someone who had money. Only once you have something can you scoff at it and hold it not valuable.

You can't demean money until you have money.

He was never one of the kids who stole and got caught. One thing he had learned early was to never do anything that they could catch you doing. Why steal the answer key? It would only make the teacher rewrite the test. _Borrow_ the key, memorize it, and return it. Then get one wrong. Always get one wrong.

Divert attention from yourself.

Learn to melt into a crowd.

It didn't matter who you knew. You could know the entire world, but as long as no one knew who you are, they could never point you out.

Never go to the same place more than twice. As soon as they learned your name or your preferences, they were remembering you and they could identify you.

That was dangerous.

Always know who could see you. Stand in the middle of the street. People in passing buses, no one ever thinks of them. What about people in cafes on the second floors of buildings? Or people looking out windows? People you can't see can still see you.

Never let down your guard, but never look like you have it up in the first place. Blend in. Own t-shirts but also own tuxedos. Shoes make the man.

If you have to steal, then, by god, be discreet about it. Never tell anyone. Don't get close. Don't make close friends.

Understand that people will always betray you. Everyone breaks.

Don't tell complicated lies. Tell the truth, but warp it. That way, you can never be found out.

Everything Alec learned, he learned well. It made him the perfect spy. He was a loner. He had no lovers, no friends. And he didn't mind shooting people.

He received his license to kill after his third cold-blooded murder. He never told anyone about the first two. It was dark, it was in an alleyway, and Alec had been on leave. He'd cleaned his knife and fingernails carefully. No one had ever known.

There was a community of spies, but it was the same as the orphanage. Everyone was in the same situations, had the same problems, the same fears, but no one ever said anything. Everyone was guarded. You had to trust the man next to you not to get you killed, but you didn't have to trust him with your secrets. He guarded your back and you guarded your lips.

And at night, Alec would find a whore or a boy on the street, and sometimes there would be sex and sometimes there wouldn't be. And like the king in the story, he told his secrets to the ground and to the rivers, but only after making sure there weren't any listening devices around. Those could trip you up. Those could get you killed. They were worse than landmines and Alec knew all about landmines.

He first met James while trying to disable one. He met James in the field and only after they had both individually checked back with M and were debriefed did they find out that they worked for the same side.

Agents with licenses were a special but strange commodity. They were fragile and handled with care, sent only into the most fucked up places on the most fucked up missions. But they were also kept from most sensitive information.

Everyone knew that the double-os had the highest suicide rate among secret agents. Everyone cracked under the pressure. It was only a choice between swallowing your gun and swallowing your cyanide. It was a high turnover rate. Always a chance for advancement.

James was the most stable double-o that Alec had ever met. He had his vices, of course, and they were notorious. Everyone knew that 007 liked women and drink, even if they didn't know that 007 was a man named James Bond who cried at night when he thought Alec was sleeping, or that he liked chocolate éclairs for breakfast. Or that he closed his eyes when he was on top and bit his lip when he was on bottom. Alec knew that because he'd seen it.

James let his guard down around Alec, but Alec never returned the favour. James knew that. Alec knew that. It was how it worked. Alec was ice and James was stone. Stone could crack and ice could melt, but they knew their jobs. James would go off for months or years and so would Alec. They would come together and fuck, but they never talked. James had more scars but Alec had more wounds. James liked to blow things up and Alec liked to undermine them. He liked to watch things fall. He liked to watch things fail.

Alec never told James about his parents or his sister even after James would talk about the accident. James would talk about skiing, how he hated snow and liked to burn it away, or how he couldn't stand the smell of a pie baking. Alec never said how he much he hated silence or the crack of a spring, or how paintings of dogs made him wince. They were weaknesses.

The first thing Alec ever learned was to never show weakness.

There was rage, of course, but it didn't manifest itself until James showed up one night talking about his latest conquest. It was Russian, one whose name Alec knew from his own personal history.

Alec was a Cossack. He knew that like he knew that his hair was blonde and his teeth were yellowed with nicotine stains. The only thing Alec could remember of his father was that he had hated the British almost as much as he had hated Stalin.

Alec didn't hate anyone. It was an emotion he could not afford. There were certain things he needed, like money, clothing, food, and shelter. Everything else wasn't necessary.

Everything else included James.

The Russian's name was Ilya and James had fucked him against a wall to keep him from checking on the bomb James had put a few hundred yards away. James had fucked him again and again.

James liked fucking almost as much as he liked blowing things up.

James' hair was dark on the pillow at night and shadows would play on his face. Alec could never touch him until he was sure he was asleep. But even then he never told his secrets.

Every book Alec had ever read told him that you couldn't trust your lovers. They would always betray you, especially if you wanted to be the bad guy. Alec didn't care for labels, but he knew what he was. He was the traitor, the enemy. One day the man sleeping beside him might be sent to kill him. The thought hurt and that was when Alec knew that he had to get away.

Love was the one emotion he could never have. Everyone you loved always ended up hurting you. They couldn't do anything else.

Money might not be able to buy happiness, but it could erase it. It only took a few hundred thousand dollars to rid himself of his old life forever. The shrapnel that hit his face was penance for hurting James. Everything else was for himself.

He sold weapons because it was the one way to remain neutral. Alec knew about picking sides. The other side always took revenge. He knew that if he made himself a nuisance, they would send the best after him. The British couldn't afford anything less than that in order to rid the world of one last Cossack.

And the best, Alec knew, was James Bond. Because Alec knew all about poetic justice. The ones you love always end up hurting you. James would hunt him down and take revenge on behalf of whatever it was that James believed in. Even after a thousand nights together, Alec didn't know that. Maybe James believed in himself. Maybe he believed in nothing, or everything.

Or maybe he simply believed in his motto. _For England._ James would hunt him down for England and he would kill him for England and at the last moment, James would know who he was and what he had killed.

You have to have something before you can lose it.


End file.
